Carver Read online

  laying Plymouth Rocks.

  George W. Jones signs his

  Your lovingly son.

  The Blue Ridge Boys

  write of their studies,

  their hopes to improve the world.

  But some letters

  are from Boys he picked

  out of lecture hall crowds

  in Iowa, Pennsylvania,

  Alabama, Tennessee,

  or after banquets of tribute

  whose fêted guest,

  with his cap on his knee,

  waited in the hall

  to be called to the dais

  and proclaimed

  Genius, Scientist, Saint.

  He pointed them out,

  asked them to stay.

  They always stayed.

  Between them,

  a five-minute talk

  and a lifelong vow

  to pray for each other.

  They write

  My soul’s in communion with yours.

  They write You

  must have been praying for me.

  I felt so near

  you and Jesus.

  The Professor stoops late over his skritching,

  squinting through spectacles held together

  by a little piece of copper wire.

  A smile, dancing radiance,

  plays over his face.

  Friends in the Klan

  1923

  Black veterans of WWI experienced

  such discrimination in veterans’ hospitals

  that the Veterans’ Administration, to save face,

  opened in Tuskegee a brand-new hospital,

  for Negroes only. Under white control.

  (White nurses, who were legally excused

  from touching blacks, stood holding their elbows

  and ordering colored maids around, white shoes

  tapping impatiently.)

  The Professor joined

  the protest. When the first black doctor arrived

  to jubilation, the KKK uncoiled

  its length and hissed. If you want to stay alive

  be away Tuesday. Unsigned. But a familiar hand.

  The Professor stayed. And he prayed for his friend in the Klan.

  Parade of the KKK

  1923

  The KKK marches in Tuskegee.

  Carver receives the Spingarn Medal for Distinguished Service to Science, the first of many such honors.

  My Dear Spiritual Boy

  Letter to Jim Hardwick, October 1923

  Your wonderful letter has just arrived.

  It is evening; I have some time alone,

  so I’m answering right away.

  My friend, I love

  you both for what you are and what you hope

  through Christ to be. I am by no means as good

  as you believe me. I am sorely tried

  so often, and must hide away with God

  for strength to overcome. I have suffered

  to do the job He’s given me in trust

  to do. But now He’s given you to me

  to give me strength, when I needed you most,

  confirming my faith in humanity.

  A college athlete. White. And a soul mate.

  A lonely man smiles at ironic fate.

  Carver as an old man

  1923

  Carver speaks at the Blue Ridge Conference (Y.M.C.A.), where he meets Jim Hardwick, a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the first of his “Boys.”

  “God’s Little Workshop”

  A hand-lettered sign above

  the room number on the closed door.

  “Do Not Disturb”

  written in the air.

  The Professor had had another vision

  of an experiment he should try,

  a question he should ask.

  The Creator’s small, still voice

  asked What would happen

  if you made a resin of peanut oil

  and added a little bit

  of this nitric acid here,

  some of that sulphuric acid there,

  some alcohol, some camphor,

  a little of this, a little of that?

  Would the molecules form clusters

  tightly bonded into one plastic

  which could then be shaped and molded?

  A thin, white silence issued

  from the door seams,

  settled on all who knew

  the door was closed again,

  made them walk softly,

  modulate their laughter,

  take themselves seriously.

  The Creator asked

  What about elasticity?

  Is Ficus elastica the only plant on earth

  whose sap is a latex?

  What about Asclepias syriaca?

  What about Ipomoea batatas?

  Coagulated and stabilized, vulcanized

  and compounded with an inert filler,

  would their sap become a half-solid, half-liquid

  which deforms under applied stress

  yet after stretching recovers completely?

  The Professor took his Eurekas on grueling

  medicine-show lecture tours.

  He spoke softly, holding up

  his peanut axle grease,

  his peanut diesel fuel,

  his peanut gasoline,

  his peanut insecticide,

  his nitroglycerine,

  his plastics,

  his rubber,

  his sleeping compound,

  his iron tonic,

  his goiter treatment,

  his faith, his science,

  his miracles.

  Eureka

  November 1924

  His first time in New York,

  as one of several speakers

  before a conference crowd,

  the Professor is allotted twenty minutes.

  He abbreviates his talk,

  stops abruptly, adds:

  I never have to grope for methods;

  the method is revealed

  the moment I am inspired

  to create something new.

  The New York Times ridicules him,

  the school at which he is employed,

  and the entire Negro race.

  Proving its prophecy, it editorializes:

  Talk of that sort simply will bring

  ridicule on an admirable institution

  and on the race for which it has done

  and still is doing so much.

  Because REAL scientists

  do not ascribe their successes

  to “inspiration.”

  My Beloved Friend

  Letter to Jim Hardwick, April 1924

  Your letter touched me deeply. How I wish

  I was more worthy of the things you say

  about me. I love you more dearly because

  you are of another race. God is using you

  to teach the world the brotherhood of man,

  the fatherhood of God. How sweet it is

  to let God purge our souls of ego and

  bitterness, and to have a little taste

  of heaven here on earth. I trust you will pray

  for me, that I get rid of my littleness.

  I did not have to learn to love you: You

  were chosen for me. I knew that the first

  time I saw you. It was the Christ in you,

  of course.

  Driving Dr. Carver

  Al Zissler, 1999

  Al Zissler’s friend Jim Hardwick offered him

  a job. It was Spring 1933,

  the Great Depression. So Zissler and Jim

  drove Carver through the South for several weeks.

  At eighty-eight, Zissler recalls picnics:

  ham sandwiches, potato chips, sardines

  and crackers; Zissler tinkering with the Buick,

  Jim reading, Carver gathering salad greens.

  They played pranks on each other. Hardw
ick once

  said at a lecture that the Professor was deaf,

  and everyone addressed him at the top of their lungs.

  But Carver was a genius of mischief:

  Later, in his trousers pocket, Jim found a toad.

  Falera ha ha they sang along the open road.

  Al Zissler, Carver, and Jim Hardwick combined their spiritual and mechanical energies to coax an ailing blue Buick along southern highways on a 1933 lecture circuit.

  The Penol Cures

  c. 1934

  The first wasted child brought to him

  for a peanut-oil massage

  was carried from the car by his father

  and gently laid on a table.

  The Professor saw hope

  shrink the shadows in their eyes:

  Yes, they saw him unalloyed;

  they were willing to believe.

  He laid on wizened, spidery fingers,

  anointing the thin limbs, his eyes closed,

  his lips murmuring silence.

  After a few weeks of weekly massages

  the boy had gained forty pounds

  and was chasing pop flies.

  Word got out.

  The wire services

  ran a story about the tentative success

  of Carver’s Penol treatment for polio.

  Crowds arrived at Tuskegee,

  children on crutches, in wheelchairs.

  Two days a week Carver massaged

  as many as his old hands could bear.

  Not to mention his seventy-year-old back,

  complaining to him all the time

  about bending, leaning, pushing,

  when all his old heart had to do

  was keep pumping its monotonous prayer.

  There were many successes,

  but many failures as well.

  He refused to massage

  one red-faced, insistent man

  who finally admitted defeat,

  turned his chair away,

  and cussed out Carver

  and his whole misbegotten

  sons-of-the-devil race.

  There are souls

  too crippled to be fixed.

  The results of Carver’s Penol experiments

  were unsatisfactory and irreproducible,

  the cause of those cures being

  unquantifiable

  and wholly unscientific.

  Peanut specimen

  1933

  An Associated Press story about Carver’s peanut-oil massages as a treatment for polio brings throngs of polio victims to Carver’s door.

  Letter to Mrs. Hardwick

  December 1934

  My esteemed friend Mrs. Hardwick, I confess

  that I have not yet recovered from the shock

  of dear Jimmie’s marriage. I feel very sure

  the dear boy has done well. I did not know

  a thing about it! Bless you for writing.

  The Professor contemplates his First Boy’s joy,

  his entrance into a world they will never share.

  He signs his shaky name and leans back in his chair.

  Carver reading

  Baby Carver

  Austin Curtis, 1935

  Potential assistants strode in

  and stumbled out,

  repacking their paper credentials.

  The Professor, grown more stooped

  and now white-haired,

  stood a moment beside the door,

  then the door slammed.

  After all these years of crying out

  for another pair of hands

  he preferred to work alone,

  no young whippersnapper

  taking notes over his shoulder.

  But young Curtis shook his hand

  and disappeared into the student lab.

  He resurfaced a couple of weeks later

  with six products

  from the magnolia seed.

  A few weeks later

  the Professor wrote to Curtis’ father

  that Austin seemed to him

  more like a son

  than an assistant.

  Graciously, humbly,

  his assistant freed the Professor

  from choredom and followed up

  on some of his earlier ideas.

  Before long Curtis had become

  “Baby Carver.”

  And his children had acquired

  a third grandpa.

  Curtis and Carver

  1935

  Austin W. Curtis becomes Carver’s assistant.

  Mineralogy

  for the staff of the Carver National Monument,

  Diamond Grove, Missouri

  The only thing he still wanted

  that a millionaire could buy,

  Ford’s good friend answered,

  was a big diamond.

  In Ford’s mind,

  on Carver’s long, skinny, wrinkled

  anthracite finger,

  a stone to dazzle an entire

  classification system of eyes.

  Ford told how he bought a flawless

  many-carat stone, had it set

  in a masculine ring,

  and sent it off

  gift-wrapped.

  When next in Tuskegee

  to visit Carver and throw

  some money around,

  Ford asked where the ring was.

  Carver lovingly set aside

  several dusty shoeboxes of specimens

  and opened a box labeled MINERALS.

  He showed Ford his phosphate pebble,

  found in an Iowa creek bed,

  his microcline feldspar, found

  in the Alabama woods, his smoky quartz,

  kicked up by his boot toe

  in a Kansas wheat field, his fluorite,

  sent by a Kentucky spelunker, his

  marcasite, sent by an English mineralogist

  in exchange for a piece of information,

  and here it was, his diamond, the gift

  of his dear friend, Henry.

  Carver held the ring up to the window.

  Ford saw by its faceted luster

  that Carver’s eyes weren’t black, they were brown—

  no, they were sparklets of citrine light.

  1941

  The George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee Institute is dedicated by Henry Ford.

  Last Talk with Jim Hardwick

  A “found” poem

  When I die I will live again.

  By nature I am a conserver.

  I have found Nature

  to be a conserver, too.

  Nothing is wasted

  or permanently lost

  in Nature. Things

  change their form,

  but they do not cease

  to exist. After

  I leave this world

  I do not believe I am through.

  God would be a bigger fool

  than even a man

  if He did not conserve

  the human soul,

  which seems to be

  the most important thing

  He has yet done in the universe.

  When you get your grip

  on the last rung of the ladder

  and look over the wall

  as I am now doing,

  you don’t need their proofs:

  You see.

  You know

  you will not die.

  Moton Field

  January 1943

  From the airfield a few miles down the road

  a new droning crowds out laughter from the lawn,

  talk in the corridor, automobiles,

  and the occasional crow.

  There goes one—no, two, three, four:

  Like lost geese they circle in practice runs

  from sunup to dusk.

  The Professor’s palsied right hand

  stutters answers to letters heaped beside his bed.

  Behind them the a
maryllis on the sill surrenders

  to the cold sky its slow-motion skyrocket.

  Beyond the clasped flame of its bud

  a P-40 zooms in at five o’clock,

  high as a Negro has ever been.

  Such a shame, thinks the Professor.

  Might-have-been plowshares, hammered

  into swords. Sighing, he signs his shaky name

  as Nelson tilts the stick to his left, pulls it

  slightly toward him, pushes his left rudder pedal,

  thumbs-up at the flight instructor, grins,

  and makes a sky-roaring victory roll.

  1941

  The first “Tuskegee Airmen” recruited for an experimental U.S. Army program arrive at Tuskegee.

  1942

  On December 9, the fighter pilots of the 99th Air Pursuit Squadron, the first graduating class of the Tuskegee Airmen, finally receive their orders to join U.S. combat forces in Europe.

  Tuskegee Airman Melvin Moton Nelson (the poet’s father) in July of 1944

  Commemorative stamp issued in 1948

  Commemorative stamp issued in 1998 as part of the “Celebrate the Century” series.

  1943

  On January 5, in his rooms in Dorothy Hall, George Washington Carver dies in his sleep.

  AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First thanks go to Albert J. Price, Captain, Ret., American Airlines, who suggested I write a book about Carver. Thanks to William Jackson, Superintendent, Curtis Gregory, Curator, and Lana Henry, Park Ranger, of the George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond Grove, Missouri. Thanks to Peter Burchard, whose as-yet-unfinished biography tells the fuller story. Peter, you were so generous with information: Many thanks. Thanks to Mike Jolly, Curator of the George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee University, and to Dr. S. H. Settler Jr. of Tuskegee, who shared his memories of working with Professor Carver. Thanks to Dr. Zoran Petrovic of the Kansas Soybean Check-Off Program at Pittsburg (Kansas) State University, for patiently guiding me toward a partial understanding of polymerization and elasticity. Thanks to my cousin, Dr. David Anderson of the University of Louisville, for sending that terrific article about Al Zissler. Thanks to my student assistant, Alyssa Fresa, for helping me with preliminary research. Thanks to Chancellor Mark Emmert and Dean Ross MacKinnon of the University of Connecticut, and to Vanderbilt University, for supporting my research. Many thanks to Benita and Dana Knight for the quiet time at the lake, and to Abba Jacob for quiet time at the hermitage.